5. Losing Tropical Rainforests

2007

2007 January 14. Brazil Gambles on Monitoring of Amazon Loggers. By LARRY ROHTER, The New York Times REALIDADE, Brazil - A Brazilian government plan set to go into effect this year will bring large-scale logging deep into the heart of the Amazon rain forest for the first time, in a calculated gamble that new monitoring efforts can offset any danger of increased devastation. ...The government of President Luiz In‡cio Lula da Silva, in an attempt to create Brazil's first coherent, effective forest policy, is to begin auctioning off timber rights to large tracts of the rain forest. The winning bidders will not have title to the land or the right to exploit resources other than timber, and the government says they will be closely monitored and will pay a royalty on their activities. The architects of the plan say it will also help reduce tensions over land ownership in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, which loses an area the size of New Jersey every year to clear-cutting and timbering. In theory, 70 percent of the jungle is public land, but miners, ranchers and especially loggers have felt free to establish themselves in unpoliced areas, strip the land of valuable resources and then move on, mostly in the so-called arc of destruction on the eastern and southern fringes of the jungle. But the called-for monitoring of the loggers allowed into the rain forest's largely untouched center will come from a new, untested Forest Service with only 150 employees and from state and municipal governments. That concerns environmental and civic groups ....

2006

19 September 2006. GROWTH IN AMAZON CROPLAND MAY IMPACT CLIMATE AND DEFORESTATION PATTERNS - Scientists using NASA satellite data have found that clearing for mechanized cropland in the Brazilian Amazon may alter the region's climate and the land's ability to absorb carbon dioxide. NASA Earth Observatory.

1 August 2006. SMALL-SCALE LOGGING LEADS TO CLEAR-CUTTING IN BRAZILIAN AMAZON - A NASA-funded study has discovered an important indicator of rain forest vulnerability to clear-cutting in Brazil

28 June 2006. Mapping the Changing Forests of Africa. by Stephanie Renfrow. From NASA DAAC Supporting Earth Observing Science collection of research articles. Excerpt: In the Central African Bwindi forest in Uganda, a gorilla sits on the forest floor nursing her young. A few miles away, a subsistence farmer burns a patch of forest in preparation for a crop that will feed his family. And as the smoke from the burning forest floats into the sky, carbon dioxide (CO2) drifts into the Earth's atmosphere. The gorilla, the farmer, and the burning forest's emissions are interconnected by a single phenomenon: a change in the way people use land. More than 900 million people live in Africa, and many of them rely on traditional slash-and-burn agriculture to survive lives of profound poverty. ...up to a third of all global CO2 emissions comes from land-use changes, including agricultural fires. Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases that is causing our planet's average surface temperatures to rise. ... Land-use change also affects and threatens entire ecosystems and the plants and animals within them. In the case of the Central African forests, land-use change has contributed to pushing three species of Great Ape to the edge of extinction. Sadly, the very people who burn the forests to survive can deepen their own plight if they run out of the vital fuel and resources the forests provide.

6 June 2006. A Rain-Forest Census Takes Shape, Tree by Tree. By NANCY BETH JACKSON. NY Times. Excerpt: PANAMA - In 1979, two ecologists at Midwestern universities ... came up with an audacious plan. They wanted exclusive rights to the top of Barro Colorado, a six-square-mile research island that had become one of the most studied spots on earth. The island, a biological reserve in the Panama Canal, was administered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, so the two scientists, Robin Foster, then at the University of Chicago, and Stephen P. Hubbell, then at the University of Iowa, approached the institute's director, Ira Rubinoff, and proposed mapping and measuring every tree every five years to monitor population changes and to test conflicting theories about diversity in tropical forests. Their audacity lay in their asking to bar all other scientific inquiries from their plot, to prevent tiny seedlings from being squashed by scholarly boots.
...New technologies speed, simplify and expand the work at the plots. Census takers can find their way in the forest with global positioning devices and access and enter information on their personal digital assistants. Canopy towers, photos from airplanes and satellites, and DNA analysis are other tools now being tapped by plot researchers.
At some camps, however, ...Scientists make do without electricity, wash their clothes in rivers and cook over open fires.
...At other plots, stretched around the Equator like a belt, plot science takes on Indiana Jones dimensions. Deep in the forest, scientists can encounter tropical diseases, toxic ant bites, spitting cobras, smugglers and armed insurgents. ...
Corneille E. N. Ewango, monitoring the 100-acre Ituri Forest plot established in 1994 in Congo, received the Goldman Environmental Prize last year for hiding data on 600 species and 380,000 trees during a civil war. He himself hid in the forest for three months rather than desert his post. "Though my country has the largest forest in Africa, it is one of the least known. We don't have so much research in botany in the Congo, except what we are doing," he explained when the prize was announced.
...Scientists estimate that tropical forests cover only 6 percent of the planet, less than half of what they once occupied. ...1.2 percent of the remaining area disappearing every year....

11 January 2006. Deep-rooted plants have much greater impact on climate than experts thought. By Robert Sanders, Media Relations
BERKELEY - Trees, particularly those with deep roots, contribute to the Earth's climate much more than scientists thought, according to a new study by biologists and climatologists from the University of California, Berkeley. While scientists studying global climate change recognize the importance of vegetation in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and in local cooling through transpiration, they have assumed a simple model of plants sucking water out of the soil and spewing water vapor into the atmosphere. The new study in the Amazonian forest shows that trees use water in a much more complex way: The tap roots transfer rainwater from the surface to reservoirs deep underground and redistribute water upwards after the rains to keep the top layers moist, thereby accentuating both carbon uptake and localized atmospheric cooling during dry periods.
The researchers estimate this effect increases photosynthesis and the evaporation of water from plants, called transpiration, by 40 percent in the dry season, when photosynthesis otherwise would be limited. ...said co-author Todd Dawson, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley... "Because this has not been considered until now, people have likely underestimated the amount of carbon taken up by the Amazon and underestimated the impact of Amazonian deforestation on climate."

2005

24 May 2005. To Save Its Canal, Panama Fights for Its Forests. NY Times. By CORNELIA DEAN. Excerpt: MIRAFLORES, Panama - A freighter slides slowly into the first of the Miraflores Locks, red, orange and white cargo containers stacked six or seven high on its deck. Gates swing shut and the lock begins to drain, water flowing into the lock below. A few minutes later, when the water levels are equal, gates at the other end of the lock swing open, and the ship moves into the next chamber. Once again, water drains, gates open and the ship and its tons of cargo head out to the Pacific Ocean. Something else is moving, too - about 26 million gallons of water, the amount that drains from the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores Locks each time a ship goes through them to or from the Pacific. ...The water comes from Gatún Lake, one of the largest artificial lakes in the world, created during construction of the canal. The canal depends on the lake and its water, and they in turn depend on the health of the surrounding watershed forest. But in the last few decades, half of it has been lost to logging and slash-and-burn agriculture. ...The Panama Canal Authority and an array of scientists are working together to study Gatún Lake's hydrology, to restore its watershed and to teach the people who live there the importance of preserving it. ...Water per se is not its problem. The Chagres drains a tropical jungle where it rains 10 feet or more each year - about three times as much as it rains in Seattle or New York, and in theory more than enough to keep the locks operating at capacity. But the rain does not fall steadily year-round. Most of it comes from May to December, in brief but intense downpours. An inch in an hour is ordinary, and six inches in a day is hardly unheard of. Rain falls so heavily in Panama that early canal builders described storms as turning the air to water. On forested slopes, much of this water soaks into the ground and feeds slowly into watershed streams and then into Gatún Lake. But deforested slopes cannot absorb heavy rains. Floods of water run off into the lake, overflow Gatún Dam and run out to sea - useless for lockage. Meanwhile, eroded sediment ends up on the lake bottom, reducing its storage capacity. ...Despite the building of a railroad across the isthmus in the 19th century, the completion of the canal in 1914 and the military buildups of World Wars I and II, the watershed forest was more or less intact until about 1950, Dr. Heckadon said in an interview. ..."Pretty soon we ended up with 3,000 kilometers of trails built by loggers and followed by cattlemen and slash-and-burn farmers," Dr. Heckadon said. In the Chagres basin and in the watershed on the other side of the canal, thousands of acres fell to their machetes and chain saws. ...Panamanians were such assiduous practitioners of slash-and-burn agriculture that some here began to joke bitterly that they must be born with machetes in their hands. Deforestation peaked in the 1980's, said Dr. Robert F. Stallard, a geologist at the Smithsonian research institute in Panama who studies the hydrology of the watershed. By 2000, when Dr. Heckadon and his colleagues completed a study using satellite imagery and ground surveys, they found 53 percent of the watershed forest had been lost. ...efforts are also under way to restore damaged landscapes. A.C.P. has begun a program called the Native Species Reforestation Project - a cooperative arrangement with the Smithsonian, the Yale University School of Forestry, the International Development Center at the Kennedy School at Harvard and other universities and agencies to study ways to protect the canal watershed and restore its native vegetation. The scientists are learning as they go, because little is known about reforesting tropical rain forests, said Dr. Mark S. Ashton, a professor of forest ecology at Yale.
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(Photo Kathryn Cook/Associated Press)
The water to operate Panama Canal locks like Miraflores flows down from Gatún Lake, which depends on the health of the surrounding watershed forest.

8 March 2005. STEALING FROM THE RAINFOREST. Ecologist Dan Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center is engaged in an activity that might seem crazy for someone who cares about forests as much as he does. For the past two years, this veteran of tropical forest research has been stealing the rain over two and half acres of forest in the eastern Amazon.

February 2005. American Forests - http://www.americanforests.org/ - Planting trees to help the environment.

2004

27 July 2004. NASA RELEASE : 04-242 NASA Plays Key Role In Largest Environmental Experiment In History Researchers from around the globe participating in the world's largest environmental science experiment, the Large-Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA), will, fittingly, convene in Brazil this week. From July 27-29, some 800 researchers will attend the Third International Scientific Conference of the LBA in Brasilia, Brazil, to discuss key findings on how the world's largest rainforest impacts the ecological health of Amazonia and the world. Never before has so much information about the Amazon been assembled for presentation at once. LBA is partly funded by NASA. Also, scores of projects that feed the Amazon experiment depend heavily on NASA's vast expertise in satellite information, computer modeling, and providing infrastructure for large-scale field campaigns. The overall experiment concentrates on how the Amazon forest and land use changes within the region affect the atmosphere, and regional and global climate. ... In the Amazon, deforestation, selective logging, fires and forest re-growth all play major roles in the carbon balance. In the Brazilian Amazon region alone, annual clear-cutting and burning of forests cover about 20,000 square kilometers (7,700 square miles or about the area of New Jersey). NASA data products from various instruments on the Landsat series of satellites have documented the history of deforestation in the Amazon since the 1970s. ... Burning practices to clear fields for farming often result in fires spreading to adjacent forests. These large fires create air pollution and can contribute to respiratory problems in people. Thick smoke has forced airports to close, and has caused highway accidents. ...

9 June 2004. NASA RELEASE : 04-183. NASA Data Shows Deforestation Affects Climate In The Amazon. (alternative address here)
NASA satellite data are giving scientists insight into how large-scale deforestation in the Amazon Basin in South America is affecting regional climate. Researchers found during the Amazon dry season last August, there was a distinct pattern of higher rainfall and warmer temperatures over deforested regions. ... The study is in a recent American Meteorological Society Journal of Climate. Lead authors, Andrew Negri and Robert Adler, are research meteorologists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, Md. ... "In deforested areas, the land heats up faster and reaches a higher temperature, leading to localized upward motions that enhance the formation of clouds and ultimately produce more rainfall," Negri said.

1998

November 1998. Tropical Deforestation. NASA Earth Science Enterprise Series, Fact Sheet: FS-1998-11-120-GSFC [2.5MB PDF] The clearing of tropical forests across the Earth has been occuring on a large scale basis for many centuries. This process, known as deforestation, involves the cutting down, burning, and damaging of forests.

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